OpenStack Cloud OS Project Rolls Out Bexar Edition, New Partners

OpenStack, the open-source cloud-operating-system project that's backed by NASA and Rackspace, released OpenStack "Bexar" with support for IPv6, internationalization and more hypervisors.

OpenStack, the open-source
cloud-computing platform, announced its second release of a cloud operating
system on Feb. 3. Code-named "Bexar," the release focused on solidifying the
code base to make it more stable and introduced enterprise-friendly features,
according to OpenStack.
With Bexar, organizations
will find it easier to install OpenStack to create public and private clouds
similar to services offered by Amazon Web Services, Jonathan Bryce, chairman of
the OpenStack project oversight committee and co-founder of the Rackspace
Cloud, told eWEEK.

Users will be able to
pre-install and create application environments and create additional copies as
needed, he said. Rackspace
and NASA jointly launched OpenStack last July to create a vendor-neutral
platform that would allow customers to move from one cloud service provider to
another without being locked in.

The initial "Austin" release
in October included OpenStack Compute for provisioning and managing cloud
servers and OpenStack ObjectStorage, a cloud-based file system, based on
Rackspace's Cloud Files service, Bryce said. Internap's
XIPCloud Storage service launched Jan. 18 was the first major deployment
outside of Rackspace.
Bexar was released on the
same day the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority distributed the final
five blocks of IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) addresses to the regional
Internet registries. With IT managers thinking about the IPv6
transition, it is timely that one of the major features in Bexar is a
dual-stack (IPv4/IPv6) implementation for built-in IPv6 support in OpenStack
Compute, said Bryce. IPv6 support was provided by a NTT, a Japanese
telecommunications giant.
IPv6 support was previously
announced when Internap deployed ZIPCloud Service, along with changes to the
storage object sizes in OpenStack ObjectStorage. Previously in the Austin
version, ObjectStorage had a 5GB object size limit, but this limit has been
removed in Bexar, said Bryce. Object sizes are now limited only by the system
storage capacity, he said. ObjectStorage also supports concurrent uploads,
where large files are broken up into smaller chunks, uploaded to the cloud and
then reassembled in the cloud, said Bryce.
The new release also adds
support for eight international languages, so that implementers get messages
back in their own language, Bryce said. Partner Cloud.com contributed code to
add support for Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization technology, which expanded
OpenStack's list of supported hypervisors. The platform already supported Red
Hat's KVM and Citrix Systems' XenServer.
Step-by-step guides on how
to get started with OpenStack Compute and OpenStack ObjectStore have been
completed and are now available at OpenStack.org, OpenStack said.
Work on the next release,
code-named Cactus and expected in April, is already under way. Support for live
migration of virtual machines in a cloud environment was intended for Bexar but
is now planned for Cactus, Bryce said. Cactus will have new tools to simplify
management and also include features to make it robust enough for large-scale
deployments at telecommunications companies and service providers, Bryce said.
Support for VMware's ESX Server is also expected later this year, according to
OpenStack.
Along with the Bexar
release, OpenStack announced Cisco Systems, Canonical, Extreme Networks and
Grid Dynamics as new partners. Cisco is expected to contribute code that will
make it easier for customers to configure Cisco switches in the OpenStack
environment. Canonical has committed to shipping OpenStack with the server
version of Ubuntu Linux 11.04, expected in April.
Code-named Natty Narwhal,
the new Ubuntu release will support both OpenStack and Eucalyptus, another open-source
cloud platform, according to Mark Shutterworth, Canonical's CEO. Eucalpytus has
built-in support for Amazon Web Services. "We'll have to see how they shake out
from a competitive perspective," he said in a video on Dell's Website.
Dell, another partner, provides
customized hardware for customers interested in hyperscale environments. Customers
can take "the optimized hardware from Dell and the optimized code from
OpenStack" and run it inside Dell's modular data centers for the most "efficient
implementation," Barton George, cloud-computing and scale-out evangelist at
Dell's Data Center Solutions division, told eWEEK. The PowerEdge C6100 servers
will be optimized for OpenStack deployments, he said. Dell also ships Ubuntu
Enterprise Cloud software, based on Eucalyptus, on the PowerEdge C servers.
It's time to take the
"learning to the next level" by putting Dell servers with OpenStack in customer
environments to "see real-life use cases," Joseph George, senior cloud-solutions
strategist at Dell Data Center Solutions, told eWEEK.